


If You Should Come Across a Crossroads

by ardett



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Bi-Curiosity, Bisexuality, Character Study, Coming Out, Identity, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:36:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29884674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardett/pseuds/ardett
Summary: Percy once came across a crossroads which diverged into two paths. He chose both.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	If You Should Come Across a Crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> also wrote this one in like middle school when I was exploring identity because apparently I didn't know how to develop character and so I only wrote character studies. and for the record, I know this is cringy okay I wrote it 7 years ago pls cut me some slack
> 
> posting backdated works so they're archived somewhere
> 
> Posted: March 6th, 2021

Percy doesn’t like the thought of being labeled exclusively gay or straight. It seems so confining and limiting, with no room to change his mind. He doesn’t appreciate how, if he kisses a boy, there’s sometimes this little, “I thought you were straight.” But when he holds hands with a girl, she sometimes says “I thought you were gay.” The worst part is that no one seems to get that he likes both. People who think he’s straight think he’s going through a phase, that he’s just giving boys a try while he’s still young. On the other hand, people who think he’s gay keep telling him that it’s okay for him to accept his sexuality. When he tells people that he’s not gay or straight, both groups just laugh and smile, saying that he’s just confused. It’s utterly infuriating.

Finally, it gets to the point where he’s with with Annabeth and Nico in his cabin and he’s not really sure what it is that sets him off, just that it has something to do with being straight and being gay and Annabeth and Nico talking about girlfriends and boyfriends and he just sort of withdraws into himself. That’s when he starts trying to convince himself that he’s not lying to his own desires.

There’s a lot of things that Percy likes about girls and no, he’s not exclusively talking about Annabeth because let’s be real, he’s a teenager and he’s been with other people besides her. He likes how some girls are small and skinny everywhere (and he means the completely natural thing, he’s not trying to endorse starving yourself.) He likes how their collar bones pronounce when they breath and their shoulder blades jut out when they roll their shoulders. He thinks that curvy girls are beautiful, especially with tight clothes that hug in all the right places. He loves the way they can pull off crop tops with utter confidence and how everything is soft with no harsh edges. He thinks athletic girls are beyond hot, with fit bodies and taught muscles. And honestly, there’s nothing hotter than a girl in a sports bra who owns her body.

What can he say, he’s a little lustful when it comes to girls but, as he tries to convince himself, it’s other things that turn him on as well. He likes girls’ hair. He likes it long and thick to tangle his fingers in when he kisses, he likes it straight and light to run his fingers through when they cuddle. He likes how a girl’s hand movements show a grace he can’t match and how their nails scratch over his skin. Above all however, is the girl’s personality. (Come on, give him a little credit, he’s not quite that shallow.) He likes a girl who actually has a personality, for one, not some giggly, giddy mess of falseness that so many of them seem to adopt. He likes a girl who can take a joke with good humor. He likes girls with an exciting personality, one that sparks his interest with every word and makes him smile with every sentence. He likes a smart girl who can understand what he’s trying to say when he can’t fathom his thoughts into coherent speech. He likes how some girls just watch and notice the little things about him, like the way his handwriting looks in cursive or how his voice breaks on certain words. He likes the way their focus can narrow onto whatever they’re doing, whether it be calculations or writing or drawing, and their attention is lost behind headphones. And he loves a girl who doesn’t need him at all. Perhaps it sounds a bit strange but what he’s trying to say is that he wants a girl that can handle him with all his disasters and mistakes, someone whose heart he couldn’t break if he tried. So there’s that.

But then there’s guys. He’s always kind had this little inkling in the back of his mind that he might have a tiny thing for boys but he never really let himself realize it until he got older, simply because he didn’t know any better. It came to the point where he couldn’t deny it anymore, not after Annabeth told him to stop staring at the shirtless boys in the camp’s lake. It took him a while to be comfortable enough with his slight homosexuality to start to pick out what exactly he liked about boys.

He likes the way that boys are all sinew and bone, layered by lean muscle. Don’t get him wrong, he loves the softness girls have, but there’s something that utterly turns him onto the way boys have none of that. He can definitely appreciate the way that some boys have the faintly visible indentations of abs, seen only when they lift up the bottom of their shirts to wipe sweat off their faces. He really likes skinny boys and the way he can feel their bones. Fingers pressuring the space behind sharp jawbones, knuckles skating along cheek bone, palms pressing down on the jut of hip bones. He likes the way boys’ hands look, long and spindly with hardened knuckles and callused palms from reckless fights and flights. He wouldn’t say that their hands fit together, like the way a girl’s hand fills the space in his and their palms press together, it’s the space that lingers between their fingers, the way their finger joints click against each other, the way he can feel rough skin abrasive against his own, that possesses an allure all it’s own. He likes how boys have this careless abandon about them, the way they jump into things expecting to fall and brace themselves for that, not the hope that they will never hit the ground. He likes the certain familiarity that comes between boys. It might have taken a while for him to notice it but now it’s fairly obvious. Contrary to his former belief, boys are much more prone to physical contact than girls. Girl’s touches are more cautious, their hugs one-sided and loose, the way their hands pull back immediately when they make accidental contact, the way their legs cross to avoid brushing against someone else. With boys, the air of uncertainty disappears in such a way that you’d think that somehow, every boy in the world knew each other on a sub-conscience level. A meeting between guys begins with fist bumps, high fives, hugs, claps on the back or a combination of the like. Play fights are less contained, with no offending body parts to avoid (what he means is that it’s really hard to fight with a girl and avoid her chest completely). Success is met with playful punches and friends jumping on each others backs. So yes, boys are much easier, more comfortable to touch than girls.

Being a boy himself, he also knows that boys aren’t nearly as shallow as girls make them out to be. It’s almost insulting that girls think that they don’t have the same complexity that they have. It’s simply that boys feel a stronger need to hide their emotions than girls. That’s why Percy likes it when he sees a boy let go, to see them open up to people they’re close to with accentuated gestures, punches of anger, tears of frustration, clenched hands of grief, streams of laughter that continue longer than ones of short mockery. And the way a boys looks intoxicated on love. Those are the things that Percy lives to see in a boy.

And Percy still doesn’t get why he has to choose one over the other. So he finally poses the question to Annabeth and Nico and to his absolute surprise, he gets a straight (no pun intended) answer.

"Bisexual, Percy." The exasperated reply from Nico, followed by a very noticeable eye roll on Annabeth’s part. "Bi. The word is bi, okay?"

In the end, discovering his sexuality was a bit of an awkward thing, as often times it is. From his lack of knowledge to everyone else’s, it was hard to find the balance of what he was. But he had, after all, this was what he was.

So Percy is bisexual. What of it?


End file.
